Thieves and Liars

The bad gun formula at the root of an assault weapons ban raises a basic worry. The formula says we are not attacking gun ownership. We only want to ban the limited category of guns that are used by criminals or madmen. But there is no such limited category.
…
No, no, the President will repeat, we are only after a narrow category of very high risk guns. But that is demonstrably false. The bad gun formula already has reached well beyond “assault weapons”.
…
Gun owners who fear the agenda of creeping confiscation are soundly justified. “What we can when we can” is no empty slogan. It was part of the strategy that resulted in the full-scale gun bans that were recently overturned by the United States Supreme Court. When gun owners objected in the 1970s that Washington, D.C.’s gun registration program was never supposed to be used to confiscate guns, they were rebuffed by the bureaucratic response, that “someone else made that promise we didn’t say that”.
…
If you listen just to media reports, you would think that guns used in crimes come mainly from straw sales or the “gun show loophole”. But these sources account for only a small fraction of the illegal gun supply. Most crime guns come from a black market that is supplied by theft. On average about 500,000 guns are stolen each year. So publication of gun owners’ addresses is a wonderful public service …. to gun thieves.